This is something I have to remind myself of frequently. My body is beautiful. My body is a masterpiece – both aesthetically and functionally. My heart beats and pushes blood through my limbs. My bones hold my entire body up. My legs push me (and sometimes pull me) through each day. My skin is soft. My stomach is round and warm. My mouth is full of smiles.

The background picture on my computer screen says “Start a revolution – stop hating your body.” I really do believe that loving my body is a revolutionary thing to do in this day and age, when so many people are trying to convince me to spend my money making better what is already so incredible.

This post is happening now for a few different reasons. First, I’ve been incredibly stressed out lately – with school, friends, work, and soon, travel. A lot of stuff has been happening which I have no control over, and that scares and upsets me sometimes. I like to be in control, and it frustrates me every time I get reminded that I can’t necessarily control the grades I get or the actions of people I know. My instinct, instilled in me over the course of a lifetime of being told my body isn’t good enough, is to turn to controlling the part of my life which will always respond to what I want. My instinct is to target all my frustration at my body instead of constructively examining what is bothering me and attempting to fix it or at least find a new way of looking at the situation so that it feels less stressful.

I have never had an eating disorder, thanks mostly to the confidence my mom instilled in me. But I have hated my body. I have cried about it. I have been angry with it. I have berated it and compared it and fought with it. Those were all things I did with and to my body when I didn’t have enough other important things to think about. I find that, now, when I start to worry about events and people that don’t matter, I also start to worry about my body. So, with the stress of the past couple of weeks, I started to look at my body more critically. I started to berate it again.

The second reason this post is happening now is because one of my classes just began a unit on the beauty myth, and how it is perpetuated in our country. Although I’ve read the book before, we read a passage from The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf – a book that literally changed my life. I realized I had begun to forget what I learned from that book: as women gain strength and power socially, politically, economically, society seeks to bring us down in other ways. The more time we, as women, spend hating our bodies, the less time we will spend running companies, Universities, the country. We lose our power when we choose to hate ourselves. I don’t say “choose” because I believe we are free to make a decision without the influence of culture. I say “choose” because I believe that, with enough reinforcement, all women would choose to love themselves, and I believe that it’s possible.

I love myself. I love my body. This post is the way I recenter my relationship with my body. This post is the way I come back to what matters – my friends who consistently show me how much they care, my family who will always love me, my plans to travel abroad next year.

I hope this post helps you recenter, reexamine, or consider for the first time your relationship with your body.

Wrote this poem a month or so ago, maybe a little more. First non-school, non-blog, non-tumblr writing I’ve done in a while.

You’re so literal
If I said I wanted to hold you forever
Would you let me?
If you told me
you wanted to kiss me all night long
would we fall asleep with our lips pressed together?

I would wake up with a mouth full of cavities –
your breath is sweeter than anything
I’ve ever tasted.
I’m a kid in a candy store.
You’re my gobstopper –
hard to crack
constantly revealing a new layer
I could suck on you all day long.

But I suck at this, most days.
This
like
love
want
need
can’t get enough of
thing.

I’m trying to get better at you.
I’ll study you
like a foreign language –
take each syllable and roll it around
in my mouth
until the pronunciation
jumps off my tongue.

But I’ll keep your name a secret
hold it in my teeth
chew it like a piece of gum
I hope you never lose your flavor
because I don’t ever want to
forget the taste.

Can I just get a little taste
of the way you see the world?
I’d like to see everything through your eyes
I’d like to see your eyes.
I’d like to watch them close
tonight.

of donating to Locks of Love. My hair is definitely getting close to long enough, and by the time it reaches the minimum ten inches, I will definitely be ready to chop it off. I’m excited for this idea 🙂

1. Don’t buy any new clothes this school year. If I decide to buy clothes, they will be from thrift stores/trade-in shops/used clothing stores. Right now, I just can’t justify the environmental impact, the human rights violations, or the overpricing that comes with buying new clothes from department stores and specialty stores, like H&M. But I do want to continue giving my business to some places, because I think not spending at all basically just SUCKS for the economy.
2. Do more research into, and reevaluate my stance on, being vegetarian (except when it’s free-range and organic). Trying to balance what is best for my body, what’s best for the economy, what’s best for the environment, and what’s best for the animals. Sometimes those things conflict.

3. Watch more documentaries. Usually, I try to avoid serious movies because I get my dose of reality from reading blogs and the news every day. But there are some really interesting documentaries out there that I’ve been meaning to see, and I think they’re important because they gives faces and names to issues I read about and think about a lot.

4. Read a lot of the non-fiction books on my list before I go to school, so when I’m at school, I can read mostly fiction in my free time. I have a feeling I’ll be reading a lot of interesting feminist/gender studies/social issues books in my classes, and won’t have the mental energy to do much of it on my own.